Now if you don’t feel you know Ann Dorset pretty well after reading
those four lines, you wouldn’t know her if she left a diary as long as
Samuel Pepys’s; and if you don’t feel, after reading them, that she is
worth the knowing, it is hopeless for her to try and win your regard.
Another and still more amusing instance of self-revelation may be found
in a manuscript familiar to many who have visited the Bodleian Library
at Oxford. There, among other precious treasures, is a collection of
notes scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and by Clarendon to Charles
II., to beguile the tedium of Council. They look, for all the world,
like the notes which school-girls are wont to scribble to one another,
to beguile the tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a little
careless hand, not unlike a school-girl’s, writes that he wants to go to
Tunbridge, to see his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer characters
writes back that there is no reason why he should not, if he can return
in a few days, and adds tentatively, “I suppose you will go with a light
train.” Charles, as though glowing with conscious rectitude, responds,
“I intend to take nothing but my night-bag.” Clarendon, who knows his
master’s luxurious habits, is startled out of all propriety. “Gods!” he
writes: “you will not go without forty or fifty horse.” Then Charles,
who seems to have been waiting for this point in the dialogue,
tranquilly replies in one straggling line at the bottom of the page. “I
count that part of my night-bag.” How plainly we can hear the royal
chuckle which accompanied this gracious explanation! How really valuable
is this scrap of correspondence which shows us for a moment Charles
Stuart; not the Charles of Sir Walter’s loyal stories, nor the Charles
of Macaulay’s eloquent invectives; but Charles himself, our fellow
mortal, and a very human character indeed.
If, as Mr. Bagehot affirms, it is for the present day to provide models
which shall make the art of note-writing classical, we can begin no
better than by studying the specimens already in our keeping. If we want
humor, pathos, a whole tale told in half a dozen words, we have these
things already in every sentence of Steele’s hasty scrawls to his wife:
“Prue, Prue, look a little dressed, and be beautiful.”—And again: “’Tis
the glory of a Woman, Prue, to be her husband’s Friend and Companion,
and not his Sovereign Director.”—Or “Good-nature, added to that
beautiful form God has given you, would make an happinesse too great for
Humane life.”—And finally, “I am, dear Prue, a little in Drink, but at
all times, Your Faithful Husband, Richard Steele.”
These bare scraps of letters, briefer, many of them, than the
“scandalous half-sheets” which Prue was wont to send in return, give us
a tolerably clear insight into the precise nature of Steele’s domestic
happiness. We understand, not only the writer, but the recipient of such
missives, poor petulant Prue, who has had scant mercy shown her in
Thackeray’s brilliant pages, but whose own life was not passed upon a
bed of roses. We are eager to catch these swift glimpses of real people
through a few careless lines which have miraculously escaped
destruction; or perhaps through a brief aside in an important, but, to
us, very uninteresting communication; as, for example, when Marlborough
reopens a dispatch to say that he has just received word of the surprise
and defeat of the Dutch general, Opdam. “Since I sealed my letter,” he
writes with characteristic dryness, “we have a report from Breda that
Opdam is beaten. I pray God it be not so, for he is very capable of
having it happen to him.” It is difficult not to enjoy this, because, if
we sat within the shadow of Marlborough’s tent, we could not hear him
more distinctly; and the desire we feel to get nearer to the people who
interest us, to know them as they really were, is, in the main, natural
and wholesome. Yet there must be some limit set to the gratification of
this desire, if we are to check the unwarranted publishing of private
letters which has become the recognized disgrace of literature. It is
hard for us to understand just when our curiosity ceases to be
permissible; it is harder still for editors to understand just when
their privileges cease to be beneficial. Not many years ago it was
possible for Mr. Bagehot to say that he took comfort in thinking of
Shelley as a poet about whom our information was mercifully incomplete.
Thanks to Professor Dowden, it is incomplete no longer; but we have
scant cause to congratulate ourselves on what we have gained by his
disclosures. Mr. Froude, acting up to an heroic theory of friendship,
has pilloried Carlyle for the pleasure and the pain of gaping
generations; but there are some who turn away with averted eyes from the
sordid, shameful spectacle. Within the last decade the reading world
welcomed with acclamations a volume of letters from the pen of one who
had made it his especial request that no such correspondence should ever
be published. How many of those who laughed over the witty, whimsical,
intimate, affectionate outpourings of Thackeray paused to consider that
they would one and all have remained unwritten, could their author have
foreseen their fate. They were not meant for us, they never would have
reached us, had his known desires and prejudices been respected. Many of
them are delightful, as when he tells with sedate humor of his absurd
proposal to Macaulay that they should change identities at Sir George
Napier’s dinner, so as to confuse and baffle a young American woman, the
desire of whose heart was to meet these two great lions, and of
Macaulay’s disgust at the bare notion of jesting with anything so
serious as his literary reputation. Yet when the recipient of these
letters yielded to the temptation of publishing them, she would have
done well to suppress those trivial, colorless, and private
communications which can have no possible value or interest to others.
An invitation to dinner is of some importance the day that it arrives,
but it loses its vitality when reprinted forty years after the dinner is
eaten. There is horror in the thought that a man of genius can never
promise himself that grateful privacy which is the lot of his happier
and less distinguished brothers; but that after he has died in the least
ostentatious manner he knows how, the whole wide world is made
acquainted with his diversions and his digestion, with his feeblest
jokes and his most tender confidences. The problem of what to give and
what to withhold must be solved by editors who, having laboriously
collected their material, feel a natural disposition to use it. When, as
occasionally happens, the editor regards the author simply as his prey,
he never conceives the desirability of withholding anything. He is as
unreserved as a savage, and probably defends himself, as did Montaigne
when reproached for the impropriety of his essays, by saying that if
people do not like details of that description they certainly take great
pains to read them.
Among the letters too charming to be lost, yet too personal and frankly
confiding to be read without some twinges of conscience, are those of
Edward Fitzgerald, the last man in all England to have coveted such
posthumous publicity. They reveal truthfully that kind, shy, proud,
indolent, indifferent, and intensely conservative nature; a scholar
without the prick of ambition, a critic with no desire to be judicial,
an unwearied mind turned aside from healthy and normal currents of
activity. Yet the indiscreet publishing of a private opinion, a harmless
bit of criticism such as any man has a right to express to a friend,
drew down upon this least aggressive of authors abuse too coarse to be
quoted. It is easy to say that Browning dishonored himself rather than
Fitzgerald by the brutality of his language. This is true; but,
nevertheless, it is not pleasant to go down to posterity branded with
Billingsgate by a great poet; and it is doubly hard to bear such a
weight of vituperation because a word said in a letter has been
ruthlessly given to the world.
The unhesitating fashion in which women reveal themselves to their
correspondents makes it seem treachery to read their printed pages.
Those girlish confidences of Jane Austen to Cassandra, so frank and gay,
so full of jokes and laughter, and country gossip, and sisterly
affection, what a contrast they afford to the attitude of unbroken
reserve which Miss Austen always presented to the world! Yet now the
world is free to follow each foolish little jest, and to pass judgment
on the wit it holds. Those affectionate and not over-wise outpourings of
Miss Mitford, with their effusive terms of endearment; those dignified
and solemn reflections of Sara Coleridge, humanized occasionally by a
chance remark about the baby, or an inadvertent admission that she has
gone down twice to supper at an evening party; those keen, combative,
brilliant letters of Mrs. Carlyle that are so bitter-sweet; those
unreserved and purely personal communications of Geraldine Jewsbury
which have no message whatever for the public;—how much has been given
us to which we show scant claim! It is true that in the days when the
Polite Letter-Writer ruled the land, and his baleful influence was felt
on every side, a great many women wrote elaborate missives which nobody
now wants to read, but which were then more highly prized than the
gossiping pages we have learned to love so well. These sedate
blue-stockings told neither their own affairs nor their neighbors’; but
confined themselves to dignified generalities, expressed with Johnsonian
elegance. There was Miss Seward, for example, who at times was too
ridiculous for even Scott’s genial forbearance; yet whose letters won
her such a reputation that we find them diligently sought for, years
after they were penned. Fancy admiring groups of men and women listening
to Miss Seward’s celebrated epistles to Miss Rogers and Miss Weston, one
of which begins:—
“Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia, is the regret you express for
our separation! Pleasant were the weeks we have recently passed together
in this ancient and embowered mansion. I had strongly felt the silence
and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are
our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of
employment, at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and
injurious mists of unavailing melancholy.”
The letter which opens in this promising manner closes, as might be
expected, with a fervent and glowing apostrophe to the absent one:—
“Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred are thy delights! Sophia, thy
mind is capable of tasting them in all their poignancy. Against how many
of life’s incidents may that capacity be considered as a counterpoise.”
Now, in the last century, when people received letters of this kind,
they did not, as we might suppose, laugh and tear them up. They
treasured them sacredly in their desks, and read them to their young
nieces and nephews, and made fair copies of them for less favored
friends. Yet the same mail-bags which groaned under these ponderous
compositions were laden now and then with Sir Walter’s delightful pages,
all aglow with that diffused spirit of healthy enjoyment, that sane and
happy knowledge of life, that dauntless and incomparable courage.
Perhaps they carried some of Cowper’s letters, rich mines of pleasure
and profit for us all, full to the brim of homely pleasant details which
only leisure can find time to note. A man who was even ordinarily busy
would never have stopped to observe the things which Cowper tells us
about so charmingly,—the bustling candidate kissing all the maids; the
hungry beggar who declines to eat vermicelli soup; the young thief who
is whipped for stealing the butcher’s iron-work; the kitchen table which
is scrubbed into paralysis; the retinue of kittens in the barn; the
foolish old cat who must needs pursue a viper crawling in the sun; and
the favorite tabby who ungratefully ran away into a ditch, and cost the
family four shillings before she was recovered. Cowper had time to see
all these things, had time to hear the soft click of Mrs. Unwin’s
knitting-needles, and the hum of the boiling tea-kettle; and he had
moreover the faculty of bringing all that he saw and heard very vividly
before our eyes, of interesting us, almost against our will, in the
petty annals of an uneventful life. It is no more possible for important
city men, heads of banking-houses and hard-working members of
Parliament, to write letters of this kind, than it is possible for them
to hold the attention of generations, as Gray so easily holds it, with a
few playful lines of condolence on the death of a friend’s cat, a few
polished verses set like jewels in the delicate filigree of a sportive
and caressing letter. “It would be a sensible satisfaction to me,” he
writes to Walpole, “before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I
take in your misfortune, to know for certain who it is I lament. I knew
Zara and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima?), or rather I knew them both
together; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your
‘handsome Cat,’ the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss,
as well knowing one’s handsome cat is always the cat one loves best; or
if one be alive and one dead, it is usually the latter which is the
handsomer. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not
think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in
the survivor. Oh, no! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine to be
sure it must be the tabby one that has met with this sad accident.”
Labor accomplishes many things in this busy, tired world, and receives
her full share of applause for every nail she drives. But leisure writes
the letters; leisure aided by observation, and sometimes—as in the case
of Mme. de Sévigné—by that rare faculty of receiving and imparting
impressions without judicial reasoning, by that winning, uncontentious
amenity which accepts life as it is, and men as they chance to be. There
is no rancor in the light laugh with which this charming Frenchwoman
greets the follies and frivolities of her day. There is no moral protest
in her amused survey of that attractive invalid, Mme. de Brissac, who
lies in bed so “curled and beautiful” that she turns everybody’s head.
“I wish you could have seen,” writes Mme. de Sévigné to her daughter,
“the use she made of her sufferings; of her eyes, of her sighs, of her
arms, of her hands languishing on the counterpane, of the situation, and
the compassion she excited. I was overcome with tenderness and
admiration as I gazed on the performance, which seemed to me so fine. My
riveted attention must surely have given satisfaction; and bear in mind
that it was for the Abbé Bayard, for Saint Herens, for Montjeu and
Plancy, that the scene was rehearsed. When I remember with what
simplicity _you_ are ill, you seem to me a mere bungler in comparison.”
This is good-natured ridicule, keen but not condemnatory, without mercy,
yet without upbraiding. Sainte-Beuve, who dearly loves Mme. de Sévigné,
complains with reason that she is not even angry at things which ought
to anger her, and that this gentle tolerance lacks humanity when cruelty
and wrong-doing call for denunciation. Yet who can remember so long and
tenderly a friend fallen and disgraced? Who can extend a helping hand so
frankly to a fellow mortal? Who can love so devotedly, or sacrifice
herself with such cheerful serenity at the shrine of her deep
affections? Her memory comes down to us through two centuries, enriched
with graceful fancies. We know her as one good and gay, gentle and witty
and wise, who, by virtue of her supreme and narrowed genius, wrote
letters unsurpassed in literature. “Keep my correspondence,” said Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu in the heyday of her youth and pride. “It will be
as good as Mme. de Sévigné’s, forty years hence.” But four times forty
years have only served to widen the gulf between these two writers, and
to place them in parted spheres. Their work springs from different
sources, and is as unlike in inspiration as in form. “It is impossible,”
says Sainte-Beuve, “to speak of women without first putting one’s self
in a good humor by the thought of Mme. de Sévigné. With us moderns, this
process takes the place of one of those invocations or libations which
the ancients were used to offer up to the pure source of grace.” In the
same devout spirit I am glad to close my volume with a few words about
this incomparable letter-writer, with a little libation poured at her
shadowy feet, that my last page may leave me and—Heaven permitting—my
readers in a good humor, cheered by the pleasant memories which gild a
passing hour.
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).